Sunday, December 4, 2011

This article was first posted on August
9, 2010. It is presented in its entirety with some minor changes.

Science fiction tends to reflect the
times in which it was written; since science fiction is the
exploration of the human condition in the face of advances in science
and since the technological bogeyman that is foremost in everyone's
minds changes from era to era, this is not surprising.

However, science fiction is still
fiction and like all fiction, it will reflect the mores that were
current in the era in which it was written.

Being evil, Kirk's evil half raids Dr.McCoy's liquor cabinet, swaggers through the Enterprise's corridors
while drinking Saurian brandy straight from the bottle and overacting
shamelessly and then winds up in Janice Rand's quarters where he
attempts to force himself on her.

Kirk's evil half gets
liquored up after helping himself to McCoy's booze stash

Later, Yeoman Rand gives a tearful
account of the evil Kirk's assault on her virtue to the good Kirk,
Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy; as an aside, she mentions she had not wanted
to say anything about the attack since she had not wanted to get Kirk
into any trouble.

Obviously, society's attitude toward
sexual assault have changed considerably since the late 60's.

This point is hammered home by Mr.Spock's rather insensitive comment to Yeoman Rand at the episode's
conclusion in which he states that she no doubt found that the evil
Kirk had some interesting qualities.

His comment (delivered with a facial
expression that can only be described as a leering smirk) almost
makes his earlier statement to Kirk, "If I seem insensitive to
what you're going through Captain, understand it's the way I am",
seem almost prescient.

As in many of the earlier Star Trek: The Original Series episodes, characters not of the Kirk-Spock-McCoyTriumvirate seem to get quite a bit of screen time. Yeoman Rand
plays a key role in this episode. Lieutenant Sulu also figures
prominently in this episode. As leader of the landing party that is
stranded on Alpha 177 by the transporter malfunction, Mr. Sulu
manages to maintain his composure and sense of humor despite
temperatures (and the landing party's chances of survival) dropping
with each passing second.

Saturday, December 3, 2011

I hadn't planned on watching Immortals.
I'd seen the trailer and thought the film looked goofy. But a spur
of the moment decision to go to the movies late at night resulted in
having to make the decision to see either Jack and Jill or Immortals
and I wasn't in the mood to see a film where the humor appeared to
revolve around how ridiculous Adam Sandler looks dressed as a woman.

Unfortunately, Immortals was as goofy
as presaged by its trailer. Fortunately, much of its goofiness began
to surface in the latter half of the film so I was, at least,
initially entertained. Unfortunately, the goofiness, when it began
to appear, was so goofy that it probably disproportionately affected
my opinion of the film.

Immortals recounts the story of Theseus
(Henry Cavill), as he attempts to prevent Hyperion (Mickey Rourke),
the Heraklion King of Crete, from freeing the Titans, who are
imprisoned in Mount Tartarus, and using them to destroy the gods. In
order to accomplish his apocalyptic mission, Hyperion needs the
Epirius Bow, a magical weapon that allows its wielder to do things
which are normally only possible when playing a video game on cheat
mode.

Theseus is aided by the beautiful
virginoraclePhaedra (Freida Pinto) who really doesn't do a whole
lot in the film except drop some misleading hints as to what will
ultimately happen, save Theseus's life by going mother bird on him
and regurgitating water into his parched mouth and get naked
(courtesy of a body double).

Phaedra before she gets (sort of) naked

Theseus's battle with the Minotaur
doesn't really play a prominent role in Immortals, which is strange
considering that this battle is what Theseus is famous for. Frankly,
I was just glad that it was included at all. However, it was only a
fairly abbreviated action sequence and the labyrinth in which it took
place wasn't really labyrinthy enough, being easily navigable by
Theseus via the simple expedient of cutting himself and leaving a
trail of his own blood. To make matters worse, Theseus's discovery
of the Epirius Bow, the weapon crucial to Hyperion's plan to unleash
the Titans, just before he was ambushed by the Minotaur, overshadowed
the following battle and its resolution. I did, however, like that
the Minotaur was only referred to as "The Beast" in
Immortals although I'm at a loss to articulate why.

Theseus battles the
Minotaur in the Labyrinth. In Immortals, the Minotaur is just some
dude in a funky hat that a dom might wear

The Greek gods are portrayed as being
very young and good looking while the Titans are portrayed as a bunch
of hyperactive savages with really bad skin. Hephaestus, blacksmith
of the gods, is nowhere to be seen. I suppose the presence of a god
who was crippled and considered grotesque would have been
inconsistent with Immortals's portrayal of the Greek dieties as a
bunch of teenaged Aryans.

Hera, wife of Zeus (Luke Evans), is
also notably absent in Immortals. I guess it would have been awkward
having to explain that she was not only Zeus's wife, but also his
sister. The family connection between the gods and the Titans (Zeus
and Hera were the children of the TitansCronus and Rhea) isn't even
mentioned, thus saving the audience from whatever convoluted
explanation that the screenwriters would have had to come up with to
explain why the gods and the Titans don't seem to share any sort of
family resemblance at all.

The Titans, progenitors
of the gods. The family resemblance is very well concealed

Frankly, I'm not sure if the portrayal
of the gods as a bunch of beautiful young people worked. They just
seemed to lack the gravitas that I would associate with gods and this
contributed to the film's goofiness whenever they appeared. Their
costumes only exacerbated this problem. In her short, gold skirt,
Athena (Isabel Lucas) looked more like a cheerleader than the goddess
of wisdom and war. Athena is also the virgin patron of Athens.
Frankly, in Immortals, she didn't look very virginal at all. If
anything, she looked deliciously unvirginal.

Athena, goddess of war
and wisdom and virgin patron of Athens

And whoever thought Ares (DanielSharman), the god of war, would look totally bad ass in what can only
be described as a sword hat or Stegosaurus helmet was, to put it
mildly, sadly mistaken.

Ares, god of war,
sporting the sword hat

The mighty Stegosaurus,
possible inspiration of Ares's choice of headwear

In addition to the goofiness of
Immortals's portrayal of the Greek gods, what began to grate on me
was just the fact that the film required you to turn your brain off
in order to take it seriously.

Zeus's explanation for why the gods
must not take an active role in the battle between Hyperion and
Theseus (Man has faith in us so we must have faith in man) is one of
those phrases that sounds pithy and erudite at first but upon deeper
reflection is revealed to have as much depth as something you'd find
in a fortune cookie.

Zeus's insistence on the gods following
a sort of OlympianPrime Directive in regards to the affairs of man
seems all the more strange given that one of these men (Hyperion) is
trying to kill the gods. It's also a little bit ironic that had the
gods answered Hyperion's prayers to save his family, he wouldn't have
developed a total hard-on for them, and the whole crisis depicted in
Immortals would've been averted.

There's also the question of why Zeus
didn't immediately use the anti-Titanself-destruct device in Mount
Tartarus to kill the Titans after they were freed. I had assumed
that triggering the device would've killed the gods who were present
in the mountain but when Zeus finally activated it, he was able to
ascend to Mount Olympus, leaving the Titans to die and leaving me
wondering why he couldn't have activated it immediately after the
Titans were freed and, thus,
prevent the bloody slaughter of half
the gods of the Greek pantheon. Of course, that would've meant that we, the
audience, wouldn't have gotten to see the kick-ass slow-motion battle
scene depicting said bloody slaughter.

Speaking of battle scenes, one of the
biggest head-scratchers in the movie was just what Hyperion was
trying to accomplish having his numerically superior Cretan army
attack the numerically inferior Athenian army through a little hole
that he had blown in the wall separating them using the Epirius Bow.
Why not make more holes or make a really big hole instead of having
your forces attack through a narrow passageway that could be blocked
and defended by a few dozen men?

Frankly, watching the seemingly endless
hordes of the CGI animated Cretan army go pouring into this tiny hole
and realizing that this was probably intended to be epic made me
titter.

And the scene where Theseus exhorts the
Athenian army to find its courage in the face of seemingly
insurmountable odds (the Athenians would have probably not needed the
pep talk had they known that Hyperion would've been so sporting as to
attack them through a narrow bottleneck of his own making), which
looked painfully goofy in the trailer, was even more goofy in the
film, since only an abbreviated version of Theseus channeling Henry V
was shown in the previews.

To top it all off, in addition to being
a goofy, albeit good-looking, movie, Immortals has the dubious
distinction of being possibly the most sadistic, non-torture porn
movie to have been released in quite some time. There's enough
torture in Immortals to give a neo-con a boner (and possibly some
ideas on what to add to the list of allowable enhanced interrogationtechniques) and a lot of people seem to get speared through the head
in the film's battle scenes.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

This article was first posted on August
7, 2010. It is presented in its entirety with some minor changes.

The Naked Time is basically a disaster movie (or, in this case, a disaster TV show) set in space: The
Enterprise crew gets infected by an affliction that makes them
obsessively rub their hands like Lady MacBeth on a bender and brings
their innermost desires and emotions to the surface, resulting in
things going very pear-shaped when Lt. Kevin Riley gets it in his
head to turn off the ship's engines while the Enterprise is in close
orbit over a planet in the midst of its death throes; according to
Scotty, it will take 30 minutes to bring the engines back on line but
the Enterprise doesn't have 30 minutes before it hits the dying
planet's atmosphere and burns to a cinder.

Oh, what to do?!?!

The most entertaining part of this
episode is seeing the effects of the affliction on the various
Enterprise crewmen: Nurse Chapel throws herself at Mr. Spock, Lt.Riley turns into a bizarre caricature of an Irishman, Captain Kirk,
in a monologue that almost qualifies as being creepy, bemoans the
fact that the two women in his life, the Enterprise and Yeoman Rand,
are out of his reach (the Enterprise because it's an inanimate object
and not a "flesh woman" and Yeoman Rand because of the
impropriety of such a relationship; as an aside, I find it
interesting that Captain Kirk, who has a reputation amongst Star Trek
fans as being something of a walking hormone, knew that pursuing a
relationship with a subordinate just wasn't done; however, Spock in
the 2009 reboot film, seems to have had no compunctions about being
in a relationship with his student, Uhura; shame on you, Mr. Spock!
Shame shame shame!), Spock weeps over having had to hide his emotions
his entire life and how his mother must have suffered living in a
society where showing emotions was considered to be in bad taste and
Mr. Sulu decides to take off his shirt, grease up his torso and run
through the corridors of the Enterprise with a sword and terrorize
its crew, apparently in the belief that they're the Cardinal's guards
from The Three Musketeers.

Yeoman Rand takes the helm at one point
in this episode, showing that she is capable of much more than the
secretarial duties she usually fulfills in the show. She is also
highlighted as one of the objects of Captain Kirk's desires,
tantalizingly close but, in the end, separated from the Captain by
what is effectively an insurmountable gulf.

Parts of this episode that made me
chuckle were Mr. Spock doing some calculations, apparently with the
aid of a 23rd century slide rule of all things, Riley and Sulu
attempting to prevent another crewman's suicide while half a dozen
able-bodied Starfleet officers just sort of sit there and stare
dumbly instead of doing anything to help, Kirk literally slapping the
afflicted Spock into sobriety, Lt. Riley rewarding the Enterprise
crew with a double helping of ice-cream after he has gained control
of the ship and then admonishing Lt. Uhura (by depriving her of her
ice-cream ration) for attempting to prevent him from singing "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen" just "one more time"
over the ship's intercom and Kirk getting his shirt ripped, not in a
fight, but by Dr. McCoy administering the antidote for the
affliction.

The only movies that appear to escape
this naming convention are the 28 Days Later films.

When I was a kid, we lived in fear of a
nuclear holocaust. It appears that even though the zombie movie
lurched its way into the mainstream back in the 60's with the release
of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, the fear of a zombie apocalypse appears to have struck a chord with this
generation. Maybe it's because we're currently in danger of becoming
metaphorical zombies due to the plethora of ADHD inducing media and
devices to which we are constantly subjected these days. Maybe I'm
reading too much into this current spike in the public's interest in
zombies.

The Dead is a fairly conventional
zombie movie. Two protagonists, US Navy lieutenant Brian Murphy (Rob Freeman) and Sergeant Daniel Dembele (Prince David Osei), a soldier
in some unspecified West African country, are both trying to
reconnect with their families. A movie with such a storyline may
have been fodder for the Lifetime TV network were it not for the fact
that what lies between both men and their loved ones is a horde of
flesh eating zombies that can only be stopped by shooting them in the
head, crushing their heads, chopping off their heads or bifurcating
their heads.

I'd rate The Dead as being somewhere
between meh and good. Its problem is that, with the exception of its
African setting, it doesn't really bring anything new to the zombie
movie genre. We've seen all this before. We have zombies and people
who are trying to avoid being eaten by the zombies. We have the
customary bits of social commentary that always seem to find their
way into a zombie movie script; in The Dead, Daniel berates Murphy
about the insanity of American foreign policy (you send soldiers to
kill us and doctors to heal us, Daniel says incredulously) and waxes
philosophic with another African soldier about how the zombie plague
came to be (perhaps it's Mother Nature trying to restore the balance
that the human race has upset on the planet). The final scene in the
film could have been cribbed from the “true ending” of 28 Days Later (that is, before test audiences saw it, couldn't handle it, and
forced Danny Boyle to do a reshoot).

What's frustrating is that there were a
number of opportunities throughout The Dead for it to differentiate
itself from its predecessors or at least crank up the tension, which
tended to wax and wane to an almost frustrating degree, resulting in
a movie-going experience in which some genuinely tense moments were
separated by scenes which were so pedestrian as to invoke a sentiment
almost akin to clinical detachment.

To list some of these squandered
opportunities off the top of my head:

The zombies in The Dead were of
the slow-moving, shuffling variety. Such zombies are a threat under
two circumstances: When they approach their intended victims under
cover, either of darkness or of the local terrain, or when their
victims begin to succumb to fatigue, since human beings need to
rest, while zombies do not. While there were plenty of scenes in
The Dead when zombies came lurching out of the darkness or the bush,
the inexorable fatigue that the protagonists would have felt in
their sleep-deprived states, and to which they would have been in
terror of succumbing, was, for the most part, glossed over.

There is a scene in The Dead which
involves a baby being left in the care of one of the protagonists.
This scene was pretty pointless since the protagonist's dilemma is
conveniently solved when a truck full of refugees arrives to take
charge of the infant immediately after the scene in which he is left
with the baby. Frankly, I was expecting the film to take a big
detour from the conventional path it had been following and turn
into some exciting new hybrid of a zombie movie and the Lone Wolf and Cub films. But no, the protagonist gets the baby in one scene
and in the next, is absolved of his responsibility for caring for
the baby. Deus ex machina sucks in the 23rd century and
it sucks in zombie movies.

In addition to the detours missed on
The Dead's meandering way down the path blazed by the zombie movies
that came before it, there was a moment in the film that invoked some
genuine head scratching on my part and another which not only
precipitated some more head scratching but some serious thought as to
whether the scene was intended to be one of those scenes in movies
intended to bludgeon you over the head with some sort of “heavy”
message.

The purely head-scratching moment came
about when, in one scene, Murphy insists against turning on the
headlights of the truck in which he and Dembele are traveling for
fear of attracting zombies but then, in the scene immediately
following it, argues that they should make a campfire, citing their
need to cook and eat something. Given this sudden reversal on
Murphy's part and that they could have easily delayed making a
cooking fire for the few hours it would have taken for the sun to
rise after which the fire would have had less of a chance of
attracting any zombies, I was left wondering if there was meant to be
a scene (or scenes) between these two which had wound up on
the cutting room floor.

The head-scratcher which may or may not
have been meant to deliver a message was when Murphy took to the
trees in order to safely get some sleep since the zombies in The Dead
are not able to climb. This begs the question why the people in the
unnamed African country in which the film is set didn't just seek
sanctuary in the rocky crags that Murphy crossed rather than seeking
it in the open desert beyond the crags where the zombies could get to
them. While watching Murphy climb a tree and set up a nest in which
to sleep, in light of the scene in which it is postulated that the
zombie plague is a correction that Mother Earth is unleashing upon
mankind, I was left wondering whether we, the audience, were meant to
interpret Murphy's ascent into the arboreal home of man's simian
ancestors as a devolution of sorts, something akin to the scene in
2001: A Space Odyssey where the apes discover the monolith (and
tools/weapons), only in reverse.

If this wasn't the intent of this
scene, I suppose you could just add it to the list of missed
opportunities.

Once again, I get the impression that Uhura is flirting with Mr. Spock, or at least teasing him flirtatiously, in this episode, as she accompanies him in song as he plays his harp. Speaking of Mr. Spock, again he shows emotion in this episode, smiling rather pleasantly as he strums along to Uhura's vocals.

Mr. Spock with a very noticeable smile on his face as he jams with Uhura – and no, he isn't possessed by anything in this episode, except maybe by a muse

There are some aspects of this episode that made me chuckle: When Charlie Evans is handed off to the Enterprise's crew, he is informed by the Antares's captain that the Enterprise is like a city in space, with a crew of almost 400. Apparently, cities in the 23rd century are a lot smaller than the ones we have now. And when teaching CharlieJudo, Kirk, for some odd reason (well, maybe not so odd, given Kirk's predilection for showing off his pecs at the least provocation), decides to go shirtless, while Charlie wears a gi jacket; anyone who's done Judo will tell you that there's a world of difference between throwing a person who's wearing a gi jacket and someone who's not; the latter task is significantly harder! Captain Kirk cheats at Judo!

Kirk teaches Charlie Evans Judo...and feels compelled to show a lot of skin while doing so

The episode's conclusion is unsatisfying; the race of beings who had given Charlie his powers come to the rescue of the Enterprise's crew and take him off their hands and reverse the effects of his rampage save for the destruction of the Antares and its crew.

Aside from the contradiction borne of its premise, Director Gonzalo López-Gallego's Apollo 18 suffers from the fact that screen-writer Brian Miller shows his hand wayyy too early, revealing to the audience almost immediately after the crew of the lunar module (“Nate” Walker and “Ben” Anderson, played by Lloyd Owen and Warren Christie, respectively) lands on the moon that the cause of all the mysterious happenings in the film are due to spider-like aliens disguised as moon rocks. In doing so, he missed a great opportunity to throw a couple of red herrings at the audience in the form of the cold war paranoia that was ostensibly the raison d'etre behind the mission of the Apollo 18. After all, shortly after their arrival on the moon and during the course of their top secret Department of Defense mission to deploy detectors designed to provide early warning of Soviet ICBM launches, Walker and Anderson stumble upon tracks which lead them to a Soviet lunar module.

The Soviet LK (Lunny Korabl - “lunar ship”) lander

The strange goings-on which follow, which include the US flag planted at their own landing site being tampered with and their lunar module being sabotaged, could have been attributed to a Soviet cosmonaut acting either on his own initiative or with official sanction, especially considering that the Soviet LK lander portrayed in the film, instead of being the cramped one-man spacecraft that it was in reality, looks big enough to accommodate at least two cosmonauts, something which Walker and Anderson fret about briefly after they discover the body of one cosmonaut before being assured by Houston that the Soviets sent only one man.

Schematic of the Soviet LK lander – you don't have to know how to read Cyrillic to see that this was strictly a spacecraft meant for one and noticeably less roomy than the Soviet lander portrayed in Apollo 18

Instead, we're shown “found footage” fairly early in the film which shows a moon rock moving around in the background and the only mystery in the film is what these moon rock spiders have against national flags since, during the course of the film, they not only mess with the US flag but there's evidence to suggest that they did some violence to the Soviet flag that was planted by the crewman of the LK lander. In addition to abusing flags regardless of the political systems they represent, these moon rock spiders also have the endearing habit of burrowing into human beings and turning them into batshit crazy pod people before ultimately killing them.

As you can probably tell, I was pretty disappointed by Apollo 18, especially since I really wanted to like this film. When I was a kid, I was very much into the US space program, and I'm probably dating myself by mentioning this, but when I was in this phase, the Space Shuttle had not yet made it into orbit, so for me, the US space program meant the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft and Skylab, so when I found out about Apollo 18, I was pretty psyched.

The Apollo lunar module – one of the spacecraft that epitomized the US space program for me when I was growing up

My disappointment was rendered more acute because the film's shortcomings could have easily been remedied with some minor script doctoring. Given the credible performances of Lloyd Owen and Warren Christie (Ryan Robbins doesn't get to do much as command module pilot John Grey but he certainly acquits himself well given what he had to work with) and its great special effects, Apollo 18 could have been a good movie if only more attention had been paid to the script.

But I guess you could say that about every film cursed with mediocrity.

Monday, September 12, 2011

This article was first posted on August 6, 2010. It is presented in its entirety with some minor changes.

The Man Trap is a typical "space monster" episode with a twist; the "monster" in question can assume any form it wishes, usually conforming to the semblance of someone from its intended victim's past, and along with the salt it requires for its nourishment, it also needs love.

Space monsters need love, too

I have mixed feelings about this episode. The creature's need for love and the fact that it's the last of its kind makes it something more than just a two-dimensional threat to the crew and also gives its death some poignancy. Professor Crater's pathetic love for the creature even though it killed his beloved wife and then took on her form (with his knowledge) also gives this episode a touch of pathos. However, the way this episode was structured felt "wrong" to me; the fact that there is something odd about "Nancy Crater" is immediately revealed to the audience and Professor Crater's clumsy and brusque attempts to get the Enterprise crew to leave posthaste (albeit after leaving behind a sizable ration of salt tablets) and leave him to his own private fantasy clues the viewer in on the fact that:

This, in my opinion, robs the episode of much potential suspense and mystery. What's the point of having a homicidal shape-shifting creature on the loose if you don't, at least, make an attempt to pull one over on the viewing audience? Isn't that the obvious thing to do? Or am I speaking with the benefit of more than forty years of evolution in the art of story-telling via the media of television and film behind me?

Sunday, September 11, 2011

I still remember where I was on September 11, 2001 when I found out about the attacks. Before going to work, I had checked in on a gaming related discussion forum that I used to frequent and saw some thread titles referring to the attacks in the off-topic section but I assumed the discussion was about some new game. Something, however, made me check Yahoo! News before finally heading out the door and I saw that whatever was being discussed in the forum wasn't a game at all.

Most of my day at work was spent glued to a television set in one of the company conference rooms feeling sick to my stomach as the death toll mounted while my mind reeled as I tried to make sense of something which really made no sense at all. After all, what sane human being decides to just go murder a whole bunch of innocent people just to make a point?

How do you wrap your head around that?

The sick feeling I experienced when I thought about how many people had perished in the attacks slowly developed into something akin to depression when I realized that the course of history down which the USA and the rest of the world had been meandering had basically taken a big detour down crazy street and there was going to be a shitstorm the likes of which people of my generation had never seen and a lot more innocent people were probably going to die or at least have their lives turned completely upside down as a consequence of these attacks.

Those innocents are as much victims of the 9/11 attacks as those who died on that day, the course of their lives, like ours, forever changed by that detour taken by history.

There will certainly be more anniversaries of the 9/11 attacks in the future but they probably won't carry as much weight as this one.

More time will have passed so memories of that day won't be as vivid.

And other events claiming priority in our memories will probably come to pass.

Those of us who are young enough to have been shaped by the attacks and their aftershocks will eventually grow old and die.

But history will go on in the way it does.

That is, until another such event makes it take yet another detour down crazy street.

I guess what ultimately matters is that we don't crash during these detours and that we get back on track as soon as possible.

Monday, August 29, 2011

On August 5, 2010, I got the crazy idea of viewing all the episodes from my Star Trek: The Original Series (Remastered Edition) DVD's in sequential order and then sharing my thoughts on them on-line. The first episode that I discussed was the second Star Trek pilot: Where No Man Has Gone Before. With the exception of some minor changes, I present my discussion as it was originally posted.

The story of the second Star Trek pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, is a familiar one: Man acquires god-like powers, man goes bat-shit crazy, man does nasty things with previously mentioned god-like powers, absolute power corrupts absolutely, blah, blah, blah. In this particular retelling of this story, the Enterprise attempts to leave the galaxy and runs into an energy barrier which kills nine crew members and knocks unconscious Enterprise helmsman and Kirk's best friend, Gary Mitchell, and ship's psychiatrist, Dr. Elizabeth Dehner. Mitchell begins to manifest incredible powers and it becomes apparent that these powers are going to his head. Science officer Spock advises Kirk to kill Mitchell before he gets too powerful. If things weren't bad enough, it's obvious from the beginning that Mitchell's grasp of reality before he got his god-like powers was shaky to begin with as he refers to Dr.Dehner as a "walking freezer unit" shortly after his character is introduced; as played by Sally Kellerman, Dr. Dehner oozes an almost indecent amount of sex appeal in every scene in which she appears. Clearly there was something seriously wrong with Mitchell before he acquired his powers. Or else he was socializing with some pretty interesting women before the Enterprise tried to leave the galaxy.

Dr. Elizabeth Dehner aka the “walking freezer unit”

Being a pilot, there are some aspects of Where No Man Has Gone Before which are different from the rest of the series. There is no Dr. McCoy, although there is a Dr. Piper, who is an old codger of a ship's surgeon. There is no LieutenantUhura. Sulu is not the swashbuckling helmsman he was in the rest of the series but is the ship's rather earnest physicist. Spock is almost emotional in the pilot, smirking rather smugly at Kirk when he feels he's got him boxed in while they're playing chess and looking downright irritated when Kirk not only escapes from his predicament but wins the game. Kirk isn't the decisive starship captain he was in the series but displays almost Hamlet-esque indecisiveness in Where No Man Has Gone Before; when Spock initially advises him to kill Mitchell, Kirk doesn't react quite as strongly as you'd think someone would react after being told that the logical thing to do is to kill his best friend, probably because he agrees with Spock but just can't bring himself to translate thought into action; this is supported by his insistence on going after Mitchell alone at the climax of Where No Man Has Gone Before and his stated belief that it's his own fault that things have deteriorated as far as they have. However, perhaps this is nitpicking; even the most decisive person in the world is going to hesitate when faced with the realization that he has to kill his best friend. At least I hope that would be the case.

There are other differences besides those in characters and characterization. The color scheme of the uniforms is not yellow, red, blue but yellow, tan, blue and the material used is different, thicker, making the cast look like they're wearing sweaters. And there is no Vulcan nerve pinch. Or at least that's the impression I got since Kirk and Spock, when faced with the problem of how to subdue a drunk-with-power Gary Mitchell, settle for the rather unsophisticated method of beating him senseless with good old-fashioned punches after which they tackle him and pin him down so that Dr. Dehner can sedate him. After the Vulcan nervepinch was introduced in the series, a scene like this would've played out with Kirk somehow distracting Mitchell, allowing Spock to pinch him into oblivion.

Despite these differences, Where No ManHas Gone Before is recognizably Star Trek with its somewhat thoughtful story of the corrupting influence of power but it doesn't quite work without the now well established dynamic of McCoy and Spock debating the emotional and logical sides of the problem at hand with Kirk mediating between the two. One could argue that Dr. Dehner takes the role that was eventually McCoy's in the series as she passionately advocates for Mitchell as the rest of the crew, even his best friend Kirk who owes him his life, grows more and more wary of him. But it doesn't quite click. I think it has something to do with Spock's characterization in the second pilot. As I mentioned before, he's almost emotional in Where No Man Has Gone Before, thus blurring the lines between established roles in the Kirk-Spock-Dehner interaction. But as I said, it's still Star Trek, if only because Kirk manages to get his shirt ripped in the climactic fistfight, thus establishing the tradition of the viewing audience being treated with titillating glimpses of William Shatner's physique in every other episode.

Flash-forward almost thirty years and I finally got to play Raiders of the Lost Ark and I was more than a little bit underwhelmed. There were many factors that contributed to my feeling of disappointment but the first one that comes to mind is that the game features an “arbitrary puzzle”, or a puzzle which can not be solved using only clues provided within the game. The second was how the game would change from a top-down to a horizontal perspective when you entered the mesas, as you will fall when this happens, presaging, perhaps, the frustration experienced by many who played another Howard Scott Warshaw game for the Atari 2600: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

E.T. after he's fallen in a hole – something which happened a lot in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and something which happened to Indiana Jones a lot (the falling part, at least) when I played Raiders of the Lost Ark

To make matters worse, the graphics in Raiders of the Lost Ark are, to put it politely, quite interesting, requiring either a great deal of visual interpretation in order to decipher the function of the sundry objects that populate the game world, or a thorough reading of the manual (and even then, you would probably want to keep the manual on hand as a Rosetta Stone).

My lamenting the deplorable graphics in Raiders of the Lost Ark is somewhat damning since I don't usually pay much attention to graphics at all; to give you an idea of how unimportant graphics are to me, let me say that some of my favorite games are roguelikes and text adventures. However, I do require that, at the very minimum, the graphics in a game serve their intended purpose of helping the player identify the various objects in the game world with which they are supposed to interact.

People may mock the graphics in Warren Robinett's Adventure, but the representations used in that game were either easily identified or quickly learned and remembered.

Compounding the problem of its “interesting” graphics is the fact that Raiders of the Lost Ark is a more complex game than Adventure, containing many more objects for the player, as Indiana Jones (who, by the way, is charmingly rendered, complete with signature fedora), to interact with, which makes the identification of said objects of paramount importance. With the exception of Indy, it's pretty difficult to make out what the various game objects are supposed to be and some of them resemble each other enough to making learning and remembering their hieroglyphics somewhat time-consuming.

Indiana Jones in the Marketplace – unless you're willing to constantly refer to the game manual, you'd be hard-pressed to identify the objects on the screen

Given how I longed to play Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was a kid, imagine how I felt when I discovered that I had waited over twenty years to play a game that sucked!

Now, I wouldn't say that my childhood got raped when I played Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time; if I had to categorize the experience, I would have to say that my childhood got flashed, which, while bad, wasn't like the mind-searing experience of the time my childhood did get raped.

Frankly, I think a better Raiders of the Lost Ark game could have been designed by simply taking Adventure and modifying the graphics; just change the Enchanted Chalice to the Ark of the Covenant and Yorgle, Grundle and Rhindle to, say, a snake (gotta have snakes in an Indiana Jones game), Major Arnold Ernst Toht and the big guy with the scimitar that Indy shot to the delight of audiences everywhere; the magic sword could be changed into either a bullwhip or a pistol, the Golden Castle to Katanga's ship and the kleptomaniacal bat to the monkey that narced on Marion to the Nazis. Just put a fedora on the square representing your character and you're set. I know, this is somewhat lame but even after factoring in the lameness inherent in re-skinning a pre-existing game and releasing it as an ostensibly new game, such a game would have been more fun and less frustrating than Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Frankly, I think that one can plot a sort of Laffer curve with the amount of “fun” one can have playing a variant of Hunt the Wumpus plotted as a function of the number of rooms in such a variant.

Laffer curve showing government revenue as a function of tax rate - it could just as easily be a plot of "fun" versus the number of rooms in a Hunt the Wumpus variant

I don't know where the plot of fun versus rooms maxes out in this hypothetical Laffer curve but judging from the dreary time I had playing this game, I'm pretty sure 100 rooms lies far to the right of this maximum. Whereas mapping out a cave network of twenty rooms was fun, doing the same thing with a 100-room network was just tedious.

In addition to the problem of having too many rooms, there are also gameplay issues resulting from moving mummies similar to what I ran into when I initially set about designing Wumpus Plus; in Robbers of the Lost Tomb, you can increase the difficulty of the game by permitting the mummies to move; unfortunately, since you can detect mummies from only one room away, it's possible to end up in a room with a mummy (a usually fatal experience) without having received any clues to help you avoid this outcome, which results in your fate being entirely in the hands of Lady Fortune, something which makes for a very unsatisfying gaming experience.

The game is set in a tomb of five levels, each of which contains 20 rooms. You will be notified when you are one room away from pits, snakes, ghosts and mummies.

You're armed with a certain number of knives that you can throw at snakes and mummies if they're occupying the same room as you; you can also throw a knife at a mummy that's in an adjacent room.

Pits send you down to the level below but if you're on the 5th level, they'll kill you instead. Snakes will kill you if you don't kill them first with a thrown knife; however, more than one snake can occupy a room so it's probably best to try to avoid them altogether since entering a room containing more than one snake spells certain death. Ghosts will carry you off to a random room like the super bats in Hunt the Wumpus. Mummies will almost always kill you when you run into them but sometimes, you'll survive ending up in the same room with them, which will give you a chance to kill them with a thrown knife.

In addition to the hazards mentioned above, rooms can also contain ladders, which can be used to climb up or down one level, a magical blue ruby, which will instantly kill all mummies that are in the same room as you, and the sacred tablets for which you are searching.

Once you find all four tablets, you will need to return to the room where you started the game in order to win.

“M” and “T” are used to move from one room to another and to throw knives, respectively. To climb up or down a ladder, press “M” and then when asked for your destination room, enter “LU”, to go up the ladder, or “LD” to go down.

During the course of playing Treasure Hunter on my Linux machine, I discovered that vb81, the ZX81 emulator that I had mentioned in my discussion of 3D Monster Maze, wasn't up to the task because it could not seem to handle more than one keyboard input at a time and in order to jump horizontally (as opposed to straight up), something which is crucial for leaping heroically a la Indiana Jones over deadly chasms, the computer (or in this case, the emulated computer) will need to be able to process two keyboard inputs (corresponding to a direction, i.e. left or right, and jump) simultaneously. Fortunately, I had stumbled upon XTender128 which can be run in Linux using DOSBox; however, you may need to play around with your DOSBox speed settings as I found that Treasure Hunter ran a little bit too fast on my netbook.

Truth be told, I had stopped using vb81 as my emulator of choice on my Linux system since it introduced some graphical glitches in the excellent Virus from Bob's Stuff, a game which I hope to discuss in the near future. Until then, have fun sampling these games of bygone years and, heck, while you're at it, you might as well sample some movie magic from those same bygone years and fire up Raiders of the Lost Ark (the movie) and celebrate its 30th anniversary!